Re-Entering the Dark
Finding my way through grief in a dark political time
Photo by Hakan Erenler: https://www.pexels.com/photo/lighted-candle-lot-289756/
I’m deep in grief. My country, the Philippines, has elected as president the unapologetic heir of a murderous and plundering dictator we’d ousted in a dramatic show of people power almost 40 years ago.
Months prior to election day, many of us turned to the streets again and again in a similar show of people power. This time, not to oust a dictator, but to voluntarily, passionately, even desperately campaign for an opposition candidate. We were rooting for our outgoing vice president Leni Robredo to beat the dictator’s son, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., at the polls, like she did six years ago in a very closely fought vice presidential race. She’d bested him by a mere couple of hundred votes; we were hoping for a similar miracle this time around, and maybe an even wider margin to indicate a turning tide, or a major sway from where we were dangerously heading since Rodrigo Duterte, another strongman, became president.
Marcos Jr., however, had something that Robredo didn’t: the resolve to sanitize the family image, and the stolen wealth to finance it. It didn’t surprise us when Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Brittany Kaiser revealed that Marcos Jr. had sought the services of the company. But what did surprise us, in 2022, was how deeply covert historical revisionism (or denialism, negationism even) had taken hold of the electorate. When those of us who joined the “people’s campaign” showed up by the hundred thousands and went house-to-house, we knew (or discovered afresh) what we were up against, and admitted to how late we were in battling head-on what turned out to be a painstakingly consistent, a decade-in-the-making, well-oiled and well-orchestrated effort to steadily erode our political memories.
Unless Robredo (or any oppositional candidate) wins, the Philippines is about to become a grim success story of how troll armies and nano-influencers can repaint something as brutal as the Martial Law years as the country’s golden age. Even with the victims, and the families of those who disappeared still alive, their witness proved to be no match to the staggering scale of a myth-making campaign intent on feeding on the economic and social frustrations that continued to beleaguer the Philippines, post-Marcos.
With the results of the election mostly out, we have, indeed and sadly, become the success story we didn’t want to be — of how disinformation can polarize the electorate and usher the return of a despotic dynasty. In the people’s revolution of 1986, it was easier to unite against a clear, common enemy: the dictator. In 2022, we aren’t directly against the dictator’s heir anymore. We are against our own people who want a repeat of a false version of the past.
On the one hand, rather than “blame the victims” of disinformation — a surefire way to further widen the divide — we could spotlight the blame on the perpetrator itself. After all, who had the funds and the intent to deceive the vulnerable? Who had the gall to abuse economic desperation and ignorance?
But then again, as Walden Bello wrote to remind us of our collective complicity, “The truth is that no matter how slick or sophisticated the internet campaign was, it would have made little impact had there not been a receptive audience for it.”
The polarized electorate mirrors the longstanding polarization brought by inequality that remained unresolved despite the dictator’s family being away (and slowly toiling in the shadows, plotting their return). Seen this way, it no longer comes as a surprise that no matter how vibrantly colorful the people’s campaign was, no matter how “historic” the turn-out in terms of number and quality of volunteers (being the fervent lot that we were — shelling out our own money to buy tarps and giveaways, standing in the heat of the sun or the cold of rain, braving pro-Marcos communities that could be hostile to our message), we really have been late in directly addressing what we’d collectively ignored all along, what we’d refused to look at in its stark nakedness lest it offends us.
The gift of Leni Robredo — through the campaign and in her losing the race — is two-fold:
She was able to mobilize a great number of us (at 14 million, if the number of votes are to be relied on) into a collective energy never before seen in our history of elections — and potentially thereafter, if we choose to sustain this to build an active civil society, with the privileged no longer passive and content in their enclaves;
With her loss, we learned that nothing great can be achieved overnight, even with the miraculous numbers we managed to gather mere months into the elections. Marcos and ilk had been at it for a decade, at least; for all their malice, they were at least directly engaging the masses, something that we who claim to be on the right side of history should be doing, or should have done.
As we find our own way through grief in these dark political times, I’d like to be reminded of what, I think, was the best part of the Robredo campaign, inspired no less by her authentic participatory politics: the house-to-house, when we stepped out of our bubbles (many of us, for the first time) and truly engaged and listened to people who are not like us. On the ground, not behind the keyboard.
By doing so, we were the first to change, not the ones we wished to convert. We might’ve lost the elections, but we won in that we’ve already begun the healing and the bridging of the gross social divide.
It’s a beginning. It’s our loss and our fault if the light that was sparked would die in the dark.
This article was self-published on May 18, 2022. Here’s the link to the original version.